CATALAN WAYS

Alfons Flores, a transglobal scenographer

Lluc Castells and Franc Aleu, shared projects

Catalan Ways has two meanings: Catalan styles or Catalan paths.

A way as a route, a track, a path, a trajectory… but also as a method, a style, a manner of doing something.

Can we still talk about Mediterranean, Scandinavian, Catalan or Czech scenography?

Do different cultures still have their own attributes in this increasingly global world where we share common references or have these features become blurred?

The PQ15, with representatives from 71 countries, was certainly a good place to compare and discuss this issue.

We presented some of Alfons Flores’s recent creations in the genre of opera. He made many of them in collaboration with video creator Franc Aleu and costume designer and scenographer Lluc Castells.Like scenography, music is a language that needs no words to express itself.

Although operas have librettos, words are not as important as in the theatre – operas are traditionally sung in their original language wherever they are performed – and are often only a pretext for music and singing, and also for the performance space, since they call for new worlds in which to express themselves.

And this is exactly what Alfons Flores creates.
Invented worlds, universes ready to be shared with us, the 21st-century audience. They connect directly with our concerns, our anxieties, our fears.

Fiercely contemporary spaces to house the universal themes of classical operas and reveal them in a new light. Harsh or poetic, but never complacent. Spaces that spark questions in us, disturb us, hypnotise us.
Huge, overwhelming places. Enormous machines where the individual is often swallowed up by the group or the device.
Places like impassable mountains.

Often performers and the space form an inseparable whole, and humans and mannequins are mixed together, all under the same skin.

Projected images change the textures of the spaces. Sometimes they tell us other stories which overlap with the originals, and sometimes they transform them, folding them deep into the skin.

The costumes create characters, but above all groups. Individuals belong to communities. Communities are apparently uniform, but if you look carefully, each individual reveals small, distinctive differences.

Costumes play a decisive part in the drama, sometimes integrated into a common proposal, sometimes suggesting another reading, another point of view.

Alfons Flores can also show us many faces. As he works with different artistic teams, he himself changes. He can build different, unexpected worlds. In some projects an angry colour suddenly appears, and he once again seduces us while also unsettling us.

The pieces on show in our exhibition – such as the sculpture Claudia which is the model for the set of Le grand macabre, or the tree which is a scale model of the sculpture from Daphne – had a life beyond the shows for which they were conceived. They became autonomous works revealing their value in themselves.

Franc Aleu created a new video to show on Claudia, and the clothes by Lluc Castells became artwork.
There was a video montage on a large screen showing images of several recent operas. This formed part of a three-way-dialogue with the Colloredo Palace and the model Claudia.

Montse Amenós, curator of Catalonia,
Countries and Regions Section.

Barcelona, 15 January 2015